Truss the saviour exposes ‘Labour’s secret plan’ | John Crace

Totally lacking in self-awareness, ex-PM also appears to be ignorant of something everyone else has known for ages

I t’s one of the great philosophical questions of our age. Or any age, for that matter. If Liz Truss didn’t exist, would it be possible to imagine her? Could anyone conceive that someone so brain-meltingly dim could have once been our prime minister?

And even if they could, would they have dared to believe that in harness with this industrial-strength stupidity there could be such a total lack of self-awareness. Liz comes with a vacuum-packed confidence in her own talent. While the real world treats her, at best as a joke, at worst as the last cockroach still standing, she maintains her Messiah complex. The saviour waiting to rise from these streets.

In LizWorld, the problem is not that we had too much of her. It’s that we never got enough. And there’s a bit of me that can’t help agreeing. Forty-nine days – really, 39 days, as during the 10 days of state mourning for the late queen, Liz was prevented from doing any actual harm – was just too short.

Yes, I know she still crashed the economy and left us all worse off, but that was almost a price worth paying for white-knuckle ride entertainment. You wait more than 200 years for a prime minister this unsuited to high office, and I was fortunate enough to have a ringside seat for all of it. Just think of what she might have achieved had she been able to stick around for a few more months. A UK on its knees.

These days, though, Truss lives a mysterious half-life. Split between the real world and the meta-world. Both existing and not existing. Occasionally spotted making incoherent speeches to small gatherings of the far right in the US, but mostly confined to a small attic space that doubles as the studio for her no expense incurred The Liz Truss Show on her YouTube channel. Each episode of which deserves the accolade of “mini-classic”. Just not in the way she might have hoped. Because with every outing she goes from bad to worse.

Late on Wednesday, Liz released her latest offering. Boldly called “Labour’s Secret Plan: Labour PANICKING as Reform surges in Makerfield By-Election”. This promised to be the inside story on Makerfield. An on-the-ground exposé of what all the major media outlets had missed so far. A perspective so radical it would change everyone’s perceptions. And to help her, Liz had gone to the very top. No need for John Curtice, every TV channel’s go-to expert for polling analysis. Nor for the equally brilliant Rob Ford, the man the Beeb uses when Curtice is unavailable.

Instead, Liz had signed up June Slater. A former Ukip member, political blogger and occasional talking head on GB News. The psephologist’s psephologist. The election guru of our times. June wasted no time in getting down to it. Even though most anecdotal evidence from the constituency suggests Labour are likely to win relatively comfortably with even Reform privately admitting they would need a miracle, Liz and June saw things differently. Labour were definitely panicking. Or PANICKING as Truss put it.